Cf. another section of De Laet’s map in chap. viii. De Laet was much better informed than Champlain regarding the relative position of Lake Champlain to New England; and he placed it more in accordance with the English belief, as expressed by Thomas Morton, New English Canaan (Adams’s edition, p. 234), who speaks of Lake Champlain as being three hundred miles distant from Massachusetts Bay,—a distance somewhat in excess. De Laet’s map is also given in Cassell’s United States, i. 240.
Some of the Dutch cartographers were not so inalert. Johannes Jannson in his America septentrionalis, and even Visscher himself in his Novissima et accuratissima totius Americæ Descriptio give diverse interpretations to this idea of the inland seas. The draft in the Hexham English translation (1636) of the Mercator-Hondius atlas is not much nearer that of Champlain.
JANNSON.
Harrisse (Notes, etc., nos. 190, 191) refers to two charts of the St. Lawrence of 1641 which are preserved in Paris, and are known to be the work of Jean Bourdon, who came to Quebec in 1633-34. Perhaps one of these is the same referred to by Kohl, as dated 1635, and in the Dépôt de la Marine, of which a copy is in the Kohl Collection in the State Department at Washington. Harrisse also (no. 324) refers to a Description de la Nouvelle France,—a map published by Boisseau in Paris in 1643.
The map in Dudley’s Arcano del Mare (Florence, 1647), called “Carta particolare della terra nuova, con la gran Baia et il Fiume grande della Canida: D’America, carta prima,”[763] presents a surprise in making the St. Croix River connect the Bay of Fundy with the St. Lawrence; and Dudley seems to have had very confused notions of the sites of Hochelaga and the Saguenay. The annexed sketch is much reduced.
The same transverse strait appears in Carte générale des Costes de l’Amérique, published at Amsterdam by Covens and Mortier. A treatment of the geographical problem of the lakes which had more or less vogue, is shown in Gottfried’s Neue Welt, 1655, in a map called “America noviter delineate;” and this same treatment was preserved by Blaeu so late as 1685.
VISSCHER.
A most decided advance came with the map, Le Canada, ou Nouvelle France, of Nicolas Sanson in 1656,[764]—a far better correlation of the three lower lakes than we had found in Champlain, with an indication of those farther west.[765] Contemporary with Sanson was the English geographer Peter Heylin, whose map, as has already been noted, betrays no knowledge of Champlain. His Cosmographie in Four Books appeared in 1657,[766] and the second part of the fourth book relates to America, and is accompanied by the map in question. The contemporary Dutch maps of Jannson, Visscher, and Blaeu deserve little notice as contributions to knowledge.[767]